I have a theory. No, don’t laugh! You haven’t even heard it yet!

It seems to be the case that among prominent figures in the worlds of arts and sciences, Jews can be found in greater numbers than their representation in the world’s population would lead you to expect: 0.2% of the world’s population is Jewish, and over 20% of Nobel Prize winners have been Jewish. Many suggestions have been made as to why this is so.

Perhaps it is a result of generations of Talmudic study, sharpening mental faculties and encouraging analytical and critical thought. Or it could be because when the Cossacks may be coming at any time, and you have to be ready to drop everything and flee, you know that you won’t be able to take land or industrial plant with you, but you will be able to take ideas and talents.

I’d like to suggest another possible reason: Pesach. Or, more precisely, Pesach cleaning. Rather than explaining my theory in the abstract, let me give you some concrete examples that have sprung fully clothed into my imagination.

Imagine, if you will, that it is a week or so before Pesach, and a Jewish mother is talking to her son.

Mother: Felix, have you finished checking those books for chametz yet?
Mendelssohn: Almost, Mama. I’m looking at this volume of Shakespeare. I never realised how much fun A Midsummer Night’s Dream is. I think it would make a wonderful ballet and I’ve just thought of a great theme for the overture. I must just write it down before it goes out of my head.

Or:

Mother: Albert, have you finished cleaning he cooker?
Einstein: Well, it’s interesting. While I was cleaning, I found that the faster I moved, the heavier I felt. I’m sure there must be some kind of a relationship between the two, and it probably has something to do with how much energy I’m using up. I just have to go and think about this for a while. I’ll finish off later.

Or:

Mother: Have you swept behind the fridge, Franz?
Kafka: I was just doing that, when I found this huge cockroach in the corner. It’s given me an idea for a story. I must just jot it down.

In other words, confronted with a numbingly boring and mindless task such as cleaning for Pesach, most of us will clutch at any idea that might get us out of having to help, and feel a burning compulsion to apply ourselves immediately, and exclusively, to developing that idea, however much hard work that entails. Cleaning for Pesach is therefore the ideal springboard for both the 1% inspiration, and the 99% perspiration, that, according to Thomas Edison, combine to form genius, . 

Which more or less describes my situation a couple of weeks ago. With the latest edition of the shul magazine put to bed, just before Purim, and this year’s shul mishloach manot project successfully completed shortly afterwards, I allowed myself a week or two of indolence. Before I knew it, the season of Pesach cleaning was on us, and I knew that I had to find some new project to occupy my time, if I was going to stand any chance of getting out of my share of the work.

The project I found is one which has been in my desk drawer (or, more accurately, staring accusingly at me from the floor of the wardrobe in the spare bedroom) for over 26 years. In November 1995, we sat shiva after the death of my father z”l. His younger sister produced, and very generously gifted to us, a bundle of letters that Dad had written home to his mother and siblings during his army service overseas, in the Royal Artillery, from 1942 until June 1945.

It is not clear to me, and now there is nobody left alive to ask, whether Dad only started writing to the family when he embarked for the Indian sub-continent in January 1942, or whether his earlier letters simply went missing. I suppose it is just possible that he relied on phone calls home while he was stationed in England. Either way, we have almost 80 letters covering 2 years and 5 months of the Second World War.

After the death of my mother z”l, in 2005, my brother Martin found, among her effects, a further 240 letters, postcards, air letters and telegrams from Dad, covering the period from July 1940 (after he returned from France as part of the British Expeditionary Force) until, again, June 1945, when he started the long voyage home from India. Martin very kindly let me take charge of all of this correspondence, and I always planned to do something with it.

In the last 15 years, I have made one or two attempts to review this correspondence, and mulled over how I could make it easily accessible to Martin (and anyone else who might want to read it). However, there were always more pressing projects (such as earning a living, for most of this period), and my attempts over the years were rather half-hearted.

I did at least manage to sort all the letters into chronological order and to remove them from their envelopes and insert them into clear plastic sleeves in a ring-binder. I even started to dip into them. That was as far as I had got until a last May, when I started thinking about tackling the project methodically.

I quickly realised that, because of military censorship, it was not always clear where Dad was stationed in India and Burma, and that his letters did not always, or even, often, focus on the big picture. So, we applied to the Army Personnel Centre for details of Dad’s service record. Unfortunately, during the pandemic, this centre is working with a skeleton staff (if at all) and, ten months after writing, we have still not received any information.

Meanwhile, I have started transcribing the letters. Once they are in digital form, they will obviously be much easier to share, and also to cross-reference. You have probably heard about the exciting advances that have been made in OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software, and it seems that there is software now available that can make a reliable job of scanning PDF documents and images and producing text files (for example in Word), even reproducing graphics.

If you believe the hype, some of this software can also recognise handwriting and convert handwritten notes to editable Word files. This is exactly what I was looking for.

When I started experimenting with freeware, and with free trials of commercial software, what I soon discovered was that, while this software may be able to cope reasonably well with neat, block handwriting, it cannot handle fully cursive handwriting of the 1940s, such as this.

Not relishing the sheer drudgery of typing out 320 letters (some of them running to 7 or more pages), I decided to take a quicker, if more circuitous route. I started using the Google voice capability on my phone – dictating an email and sending it to myself, then opening the email on my laptop, copying and pasting the dictated text into a Word document and editing it there. I’ve used this method for the first 10 letters, and it works fairly well, although, not unreasonably, the dictation app stumbles over Dad’s occasional Yiddish term, and fails to recognise the names of some of the smaller villages in Berkshire and County Durham where Dad was billeted at various periods in 1940–41.

I have just switched to using the Voice Typing tool in Google Docs in Chrome, allowing me to dictate directly on the laptop, and copy-paste from there into Word. This should be faster and, initially, seems a little more accurate. It also has the advantage of correctly interpreting more spoken punctuation commands, correctly reproducing brackets and paragraph breaks, for example.

(If anyone out there can recommend more effective software, I would be thrilled to hear…although, to be honest, reading all of the letters aloud means that I do not miss any nuances, and gives me a much better feel of the tone and content of each letter.)

When I check the digital text against the handwritten letter, to correct any errors, I also make a note of placenames and people’s names. I am building an Excel of links to Google Maps for all of the locations where Dad was stationed.

I have also started thinking about possible readership. At least two of Dad’s grandchildren have already expressed an interest in the letters, and I am trying to bear in mind, as I read the digitized letters, what references they might need help in understanding. So, at the moment, as I go along, I am adding footnotes.

Juggling these different tasks, reading from my own perspective and also attempting to read from a younger generation’s perspective, is proving a stimulating exercise. However, in addition to that, I am finding real pleasure in discovering and savouring each of these letters in turn.

It has become a cliché that email and social media have killed the art of letter-writing. The first point most people make when bemoaning this is that it will be very unlikely that anyone’s accumulated emails will survive to be handed on to another generation. They will almost certainly have been deleted long before then.

What is also striking to me, as I read, is that letter-writing is a completely different activity from writing an email. First, when a letter is sent it is not instantaneously received; rather, time (days, or sometimes weeks) pass between sending and receiving. This gives the author incentive to be a little more reflective, to compose the letter, rather than firing off an email. It is the easiest thing in the world to send a second email immediately after the first, mentioning what was forgotten. However, nobody wants to have to send a second letter so soon after the first.

In addition, when we send a letter, we know that the reply will take time to arrive, whereas emails are responded to increasingly quickly. A snailmail correspondence is to be savoured, whereas an email correspondence is usually more pragmatic and prosaic. (Both of those last two points are, of course, even truer for SMS and WhatsApp messages than for emails, and undoubtedly even more truer for social media that I haven’t even heard of.)

Incidentally, please don’t write to point out the grammatical error in the phrase ‘even more truer‘. I am well aware of it; it’s just that:
a) I am writing for comic effect;
b) I enjoy winding some of my stuffier readers up (sorry: …winding up some of my stuffier readers);
c) I find myself increasingly sympathetic to Humpty Dumpty’s approach to language:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

But I digress.

To read Dad’s letters is to glimpse a more leisurely, less frenetic world of social intercourse: one that was more considered and nuanced, less direct, blunt and instantaneous. 

However, the real joy for me in reading this correspondence lies in the insight the letters give me into not only Dad’s personality and interests, but also the bond between Mum and Dad. This young man (21 years old when his letters to his future wife begin in 1940) both is, and is not yet, my father. There are many traits and mannerisms that I instantly recognise; there are also, fascinatingly, hints of characteristics that are less familiar to me.

I feel extraordinarily privileged to have this opportunity to enjoy Dad’s company again. My sole, but immense, disappointment is that I am missing the other half of this correspondence – Mum’s letters to Dad. He sometimes makes tantalising references to the content of those letters, but, sadly, they did not, apparently, survive the twin journeys from India to England, and from the 1940s to the 1990s.

Meanwhile, even to process just one side of this correspondence is, I suspect, going to keep me occupied for many enjoyable and satisfying months to come.

Back in Portugal, Tao may be nowhere near ready to read his great-grandfather’s letters yet, but, on his second birthday last week, he looked as though he could have helped him out cutting herring in the shop!

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